Anonymous
by Haysel McKalister
Summary: Orla Quirke is a third year Ravenclaw with a fascination with the unknown. When a secret admirer, who up until now has insisted on staying anonymous, wants to meet, Orla may just find out that she's been literally flirting with danger. OrlaBast, RPGinspir


**The Requisite Disclaimer,** as no fanfic is complete without it:

The following characters belong to the wonderful and talented J.K.Rowling, and the basic plotline and characterizations are those which hail from back in the glory days of the wonderful and magical Evinco RPG on Greatestjournal. Orla's characterization is mine, and the characterization of Orla's "special buddy" is based off of the way that the lovely and talented Jennee portrayed him in the game. And a special thanks goes out to Amy for always keeping their ship's flag of hers always waving high, even long after the game had closed.

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"Boys in third year are _so_ immature!" Emma Dobbs exploded, slamming the door as she stomped into the Ravenclaw girls dormitory, flopping down on her bed in a fit of teenage angst. Glancing up from her pillows a few moments later, feeling her performance had gone terribly unappreciated, commenced in staring daggers at the only one of her dormmates currently in the room, Orla Quirke.

Unable to ignore Emma's heated glare any longer, Orla looked up from her cross-legged position on her bed, glancing away from the journal in her lap for the first time since Emma had entered. "Something troubling you, Em?" Orla inquired with a small smirk, knowing that whatever had happened couldn't have possibly earned a display of that caliber.

"It's Stewart!" Emma sighed over-dramatically, too caught up in her own woe to hear Orla's small mutter of "again?" Swirling around into a sitting position, Emma continued expelling her anguish. "He just _doesn't_ get it. I'm trying _so_ hard to act like I'm actually interested in all of his comic book and superhero nonsense, and I just can't do it any more! Everything I say to him, he twists around and goes back into babbling about Catman!"

"_Bat_man. Cat_woman_," Orla corrected her nonchalantly, her attention drawn away from Emma and back down to her journal once again. Having always been amazed by the enchanted diaries that the Weasley twins had put on the market over the past summer, Orla was more appreciative of the book now more than ever. Little did Emma know that Orla was currently having another much more interesting conversation with someone else via the journals then the one Emma was basically having with herself regarding her boy troubles.

Not that Emma would've noticed that Orla wasn't paying attention. "UGH! Whatever. Batman, okay. It's still stupid." She took a moment to stew silently before throwing her arms up in frustration as a new thought entered her head. "GAH, and then you have Dennis blathering on to him about Legos while I'm trying to get Stewart to complement this awesome thing with my hair, but does he? NO!" she answered herself. "He starts talking about BATMAN LEGOS! UGH, I just want to be like "Um, hello, you're thirteen, not _seven_"! I can't stand it, Orla! I just can't _stand it_!" Emma cried out, collapsing back onto her pillows once again.

Orla had to bite her tongue to keep herself from mentioning something that she couldn't stand. Shutting her journal and hugging it to her chest as she rose to her feet, Orla merely replied, "I gave Dennis those Legos," in a dreamy voice before making her way out of the room. Obviously, it would be best for them both if Emma was given some alone time. Besides, Orla wanted to avoid any chance that Emma might get bored with herself and turn her attention to wanting to know what (or who) had Orla so distracted with in the journal.

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The "what" was simple. The "what" was a boy, a rather mysterious one at that, to the point where the "who" was impossible to discover. He'd hexed each one of his comments into her Charmed journal (magically linked to anyone else in the wizarding would who happened to have one) both anonymously and privately to Orla, leaving them unseen by anyone else, and untraceable by any means of magic that the third year possessed. And as curious as Orla was as to his identity, she honestly hadn't tried all that hard to hunt down who the mystery boy was. She sometimes wondered if his air of mystery is what kept her so enchanted.

That's not to say that she hadn't been slipped a few characterizing clues as time had gone by. He was older than her, most definitely. Having that much of a way with words? The boy _had_ to be at _least_ a fourth year. Orla was also convinced that he wrote like a brunette, which was fine by her.

And then there was the fact that he was a Slytherin. Never one to want to judge a person based on their House over their character, that detail never bothered Orla in the slightest. He was just as funny and intelligent and clever as anyone else, be the person Slytherin or Ravenclaw. And if he was still willing to talk to her despite a difference in blood statuses, Orla wasn't about to make it an issue. Sure, he had his odd points, especially since the first time they'd spoken through the journals he'd been threatening to use the Cruciatus curse on her as she slept, but as Orla grew to understand that he just had a very peculiar and inappropriately timed sense of humour. Orla found it endearing, and only mildly creepy.

And of course, that was because at the time he was playing off another slew of anonymous comments that had been circulating through the journals, supposedly coming from the Death Eater responsible for the murder of Ravenclaw alumnus Penelope Clearwater. After bantering back and forth with her own anonymous commenter for a bit, it became clear that the comments Orla was receiving were coming from another source. After all, what kind of Death Eater would really engage in a "Why am I even explaining this to you?" "You started it!" "You replied!" "You replied to me replying!" conversation?

From that point on, their talks moved from empty threats to more conversational topics. The two would flirt between the lines, he would complement Orla on getting a part in play that Hogwarts was putting on that year, she'd positively squee with delight when he would write in French to her. Orla never bugged the commenter as to his identity, and as time went on, this seemed to work as a trick to get him to reveal even more about himself. He hated History of Magic. He'd once dated a girl who was insanely into Divination. He was a fantastic painter.

And on Valentine's Day, Orla's passive aggressive research into his identity's discovery hit a breakthrough. He'd owled her a small teddy bear, with a note attached, signed only as "B.L." That alone was quite enough to make Orla's month, her crush on her secret friend having grown quite large by that point. However, searching through the class rosters of all the Slytherin males, Orla was unable to find anyone with a name that fit these qualities. Shrugging her disappointment off, she figured that perhaps the second initial was actually his middle name, or something along those lines. She'd figure it out sooner or later.

It was him that Orla had been talking with through her journal when Emma had burst up into their dormitory, and frankly at the time, Orla could not have possibly cared less about Stewart, comics, Dennis, and legos. The final Hogsmeade Weekend of the year was coming up, and she'd been in the process of using every trick in the book on calligraphy-flirting to try to get B.L. to meet her there. And just as Emma's rant about third year boys hit its catharsis, the conversation within the pages of the journal reached its. B.L. invited Orla to meet him just outside The Three Broomsticks the upcoming Saturday.

Orla agreed straight away, positively beaming with delight as she shut her journal. Lounging on a couch in the Ravenclaw common room, flipping through her Astronomy textbook without really reading anything written in it, Orla couldn't've been happier. After all these months of not even knowing his _name_, Orla was finally going to get her chance to meet the handwriting she'd fallen in love with! Journal-Boy really and truly wanted to meet her! Her plan had worked!

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Orla was completely unaware that as he closed his own journal, Rabastan Lestrange was having the same thought.

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